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Critics May Rant, but ‘Addams Family’ Rakes It In

A scene from “The Addams Family,” featuring Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane, which opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The new Broadway musical “The Addams Family” opened Thursday to the sort of scathing reviews that would bury most shows in the graveyard next to the Addamses’ forbidding mansion.

The result: The show sold $851,000 in tickets last weekend on top of a $15 million sales advance, huge figures for a new Broadway run, and all but guaranteeing that it will be hard to snag a pair of good orchestra seats until fall. After five months of well-publicized creative difficulties for the show, this seeming paradox amounts to a theater world version of the golden fleece: the critic-proof smash.

Hollywood, pop music studios and book publishers long ago mastered the art of assembling commercially successful products that critics hate. Theater is different: Only a fraction of shows turn a profit to begin with (about 30 percent on Broadway each year), and expensive tickets, fixed performance schedules and a finite potential audience for most live theater increase the importance of reviews.

Yet “The Addams Family” seems to have cracked a formula that to various degrees made long-running hits of “Jekyll & Hyde,” “Beauty and the Beast,””Mamma Mia!” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” after being dismissed by many critics. Such shows have tended to attract audiences already fond of their songs or characters.

That formula for “The Addams Family” includes a beloved brand-name title, a famous star, an inoffensive script, echoes of nostalgia and some savvy commercial judgments. The producers chose a theater with an unusually large number of orchestra seats, many of which they can sell at premium prices that top out at $300 apiece. And, in an unusual move for Broadway, they recruited five regional theaters as producing partners, spreading the financial risk while also having access to their subscribers and to those theaters for a national tour.

While the creators promised to base the musical on Charles Addams’s mordantly sophisticated cartoons in The New Yorker, they ended up adding the theme song of the “Addams Family” television show for the audience to snap-snap along with before the curtain even goes up. In hopes of improving the show between a Chicago tryout and its Broadway run, they also added broad, sometimes goofy touches like a toupee-wearing Uncle Fester and a Grandma dressed like a Red Cross nurse — images that make some people laugh, but belie the darker spirit of the Addams cartoons for others.

The producers also built a marketing campaign that would cover all the bases, using images that would remind people of the cartoons, the television show, and the “Addams Family” movies. And the casting of Nathan Lane to play the paterfamilias Gomez, through at least next March, has been especially important to the musical’s fortunes, according to several theater producers not affiliated with the show, given that he is a popular actor with both theater- and film-goers.

“If Nathan Lane is in anything you already have my money in the till, and I imagine that there are thousands of others who feel the same,” said Michael Ritchie, artistic director of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, which is not associated with “The Addams Family.”

Whether the musical — which cost $16.5 million to mount on Broadway — can flourish without a well-known star like Mr. Lane is among the factors that will determine whether the show endures as critic-proof. Based on 26 major reviews for “The Addams Family,” including one in The New York Times, the theater Web site Stagegrade.com gave the show a median grade of D+. For now, however, the musical has grossed $6.5 million in five weeks — more than current hit musicals like “A Little Night Music,” “Billy Elliot,” “West Side Story” and “Wicked” did in their early weeks — and the producers are already planning a multicity national tour.

Photo

Kevin Chamberlin as Uncle Fester and Jackie Hoffman as Grandma performing onstage in “The Addams Family.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“We sought to create a musical that was not only very funny, but also surprised the audience by proving to be touching as well,” Roy Furman, one of the lead producers of the show, said in an interview by e-mail. “We are delighted that audiences have responded so strongly, as evidenced by nightly ovations, and word of mouth, which has sparked advance sales.”

Four years in the making, “The Addams Family” had a pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago last winter, drawing huge crowds but mixed reviews from critics there. Those reviews prompted Mr. Furman and the other lead producer, Stuart Oken, to hire the veteran Broadway director Jerry Zaks to take over the show from its two directors, the Broadway newcomers Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, and ostensibly fix “The Addams Family” before opening in New York.

Mr. Zaks, in fact, did not make many changes in the show, based on two viewings in Chicago and two in New York. The characterizations and pacing remained mostly the same. Most structural changes, meanwhile, came in the first act and were designed to introduce “the family and its eccentricities” more clearly, Mr. Oken said by e-mail.

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The Chicago opening number, “Clandango,” with the family singing in a cemetery, featured the character Wednesday in a coffin and chorus members holding tombstones as they danced. A new opener for Broadway, “When You’re An Addams,” is more lighthearted and generic, with Mr. Lane giving commands to the dancing family and chorus members: “Bunny hop!” “Do the twist!” “Death rattle!”

A song and subplot about the sex life of Gomez and Morticia (played by Bebe Neuwirth) was cut for Broadway, as was an elaborate Act II swordfight between the couple. Additions for New York included a new second-act opening number for Morticia, “Just Around the Corner,” in which she humorously embraces the idea of death. It replaced a song in Chicago called “Second Banana,” in which Morticia bemoaned growing older just as her daughter Wednesday is falling in love — another subplot that struck “Addams” aficionados as un-Morticialike, and was softened for New York.

“Those changes were made to strengthen and deepen the Gomez/Morticia relationship for the audience,” Mr. Oken said. “We also wanted to show Gomez and Morticia as deeply committed parents, who like all parents, are thrown off base when their child suddenly seems to have become an adult overnight and has fallen in love.”

These changes and other elements of the script were derided by some critics as contrary to the sensibility of the cartoons. But following the lead of “Wicked,” Broadway’s biggest hit in years, “The Addams Family” aimed to appeal both to parents and children, thanks especially to its central plot, about the eccentric Addams clan encountering another, more normal family. That plot, too, drew some criticism in Chicago as hoary, but Mr. Oken said it was never considered for elimination for Broadway.

Whether the post-Chicago changes improved the show or amounted to a scratch, “The Addams Family” is selling as well as it did during its tryout. Scott Mallalieu, president of Group Sales Box Office, a major Broadway ticket seller, said in an interview Monday that “The Addams Family” remained the biggest ticket advance of any Broadway show that his company has sold this year. He said that no groups had canceled their tickets since the negative reviews last week.

And executives at the other regional theaters producing the show said that while it was impossible to predict how the musical would do without the popular Mr. Lane, they were optimistic that the title alone would make for a blockbuster.

“Even before Nathan and Bebe were announced, our subscribers were extremely excited just by the idea of ‘The Addams Family’ as theater,” said David Fay, president of the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford, one of the theaters that is producing the show. “Our audiences don’t expect to see a star on the road. What they are sure they will get, with a title like ‘The Addams Family,’ is humor, fun, and delight at being in that Addams milieu.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 14, 2010, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Critics May Rant, but ‘Addams’ Rakes It In. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe